Multiple Fishawack Health businesses unite; Q&A with Ross Toohey

UK-based Fishawack Health has reorganized business operations as a leading global commercialization partner for the life sciences industry. According to management, this is in response to client demand for a more agile, integrated service offering, which is heightened by the pandemic-fueled shifts in the healthcare landscape. The company has introduced a new identity that articulates the evolved value proposition.

For two months, Fishawack Health carried out extensive research with clients across the industry to understand how they are adjusting to the pressures of COVID-19. According to Fishawack Health, the research uncovered significant disruptions, revealing long-term implications for clinical development, patient pathways, the customer journey, and launch and go-to-market models. 

The new organization combines all component capabilities from the group companies into an integrated offering, organized into Commercial, Consulting, and Medical Communications operating units. Many legacy group brands continue to exist, unified under the new Fishawack Health identity. Leadership and management teams have been aligned with the new organization.

After Fishawack Health announced the company’s reorganization into a global commercialization partner for a post-pandemic world, Med Ad News sat down virtually with Ross Toohey, chief commercialization officer of Fishawack Health, to talk about the reasons for the consolidation, the opportunities COVID-19 presented in putting the consolidation into effect, and the differences between Fishawack and traditional agency networks. 

Med Ad News: Were there any challenges COVID presented, in getting this revamp up and running?

Ross Toohey: It was actually an interesting marriage of opportunity, sort of a silver lining in this whole weird last six months that we’ve had. First of all, outside of COVID, Fishawack Health had been through this process of building a new promise in the marketplace, identifying that there was a need for an integrated commercialization partner. What we saw was a desire to acquire the best of the best service providers and agencies across the entire landscape and bring them into one family. So that was already going on pre-COVID for reasons that had been accelerated because of COVID.

And starting at the beginning of this year in January, we were looking at how we had acquired these businesses and wanted to start integrating them. While operational integration had already started, we wanted to start working on an outward facing, public facing brand to represent the new promise. And then COVID hit.

What COVID did was that it accented and magnified the importance of a lot of the value proposition we were trying to solve, that we were already trying to solve with this integrated offering.

Commercializing and launching a drug is already a complex process. And if you compare the process of commercializing a therapy today to even 10 years ago, it’s vastly different and more complex. There are more channels, there are more audiences at play, there’s more at stake, there are more therapies that need to be commercialized. There are not exponentially more marketers in the marketplace. You have fewer people trying to launch more therapies in an ever more complex environment, and so the need for an integrated expert commercialization partner has reared its head, it’s more important now than ever. So that was what we were building, and COVID has only accentuated how important that is. It was just a weird convenience of those two things happening at the same time.

Med Ad News: How would you describe Fishawack’s capabilities now compared with before? What has this integration strengthened and consolidated?

Ross Toohey: Let’s rewind five years. Prior to five years ago, Fishawack was almost exclusively medical communications. It was one of the largest, privately owned medcomms agencies in the world, but from a service standpoint, it was almost exclusively medcomms. Over the last five year period, expanding into commercial and consulting capabilities, has been our strategic priority – acquiring 2e [Creative], where I’m from, to get med device and pharma launch expertise under the belt; Dudnyk, to get rare disease expertise under the belt; Blue Latitude to get commercial consulting expertise under the belt; and lately Skysis to get commercial consulting and market access. So we’ve pulled all of these things together. And even though under the last five years they’ve been assembled into one family, what’s changed lately and what’s different now compared to then is the customer experience. As you can imagine, prior to this, it was more of a network feel. We had a lot of different agencies and clients gained access to that family of agencies.

What’s new is that we’re providing a more cohesive, integrated client experience as clients go from capability to capability across the group. And that’s all operational, that’s all on the back end.

Med Ad News: How have clients reacted to this integration as you’ve moved forward, and how do they find Fishawack different from other agency networks?

Ross Toohey: The response from existing clients as you can imagine has been overwhelmingly positive in that they are interested in the other capabilities. Say if you were a legacy 2e client, you’d go, “Oh, look at all of these other capabilities that we now have access to!” Same with Dudnyk, “Oh, you guys have offices in the UK? You can help us with a global commercialization, so let’s talk about that.” Existing clients have only seen an increase in the access to experts, beyond what they were used to, which is always great. New clients, as we’re talking to prospects of this new promise, what we’re getting is generally and overwhelmingly positive interest, but what’s refreshing is that what people are responding to the most is that we’re trying to take a different approach to the idea that we’re trying to bring all of these things together into one cohesive experience – all of these capabilities and all of this access to experts in one cohesive experience.

As what’s different right now, when you think of an agency, Fishawack is not an agency anymore. We refer to it as a commercialization partner. But the skillset has expanded beyond what we traditionally define as an agency, so that it’s hard to even use that phrase anymore. Agencies can be really good at a few things but you can’t be great at everything. And so what would generally happen is that an agency would be really good at rare disease, or really good at creative, or really good at strategy, and then OK at some other items. And they would have to bridge together third-party partners or a little bit of “fake it until you make it” in order to bring a really engaging, cohesive offering to the table.

We’ve been able to reconstruct that, but only with the best of the best. We intentionally went out and hired the best of the best, and acquired the best of the best, in order to build this experience. So what’s unique is that clients have access to this highly bespoke, highly customized-to-their-needs, expert panel for commercializing their therapy. From way upstream, pre-commercial medcomms and publication strategy, consulting, market segmentation, market access, to the commercial stuff on the agency side, the creative, launch campaign, digital, media, and all of these other expertises.

That’s just a new concept, and it’s just been refreshing to see how novel it’s played into some of these conversations. We’re operating as one company versus a network, which would be a family of multiple companies.